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Yandex joins CERN openlab

January 31, 2013

Internet, January 31, 2013. Yandex (NASDAQ:YNDX), Russia’s leading search engine, has announced a one year Associate Sponsorship agreement with CERN openlab, a framework to test and validate cutting-edge information technologies and services in partnership with industry at CERN. In its quality of Associate, Yandex will provide computing resources as well as its proprietary data processing technologies, including the machine learning technology MatrixNet, to CERN researchers.

MatrixNet is already under use on data of B-meson decay analysis, at the LHCb experiment, one of the four big LHC detectors. While this is just the first case of the technology’s application at CERN, it encourages Yandex to provide MatrixNet for analysis of a variety of other decays and other complex physical processes. The technology allows physicists to perform filtering of huge datasets in order to find extremely rare events. By achieving a high level of precision in identifying such events, scientists can confirm or refute physical models and theories. Until recently, CERN researchers depended on Yandex specialists to fully exploit the power of MatrixNet, but the development of a user-friendly service that will give physicists an opportunity to use Yandex’s machine learning technology on their own is already in progress, expanding the application fields of this technology.

“Today’s physics deals with large datasets that need to be properly processed and interpreted. New discoveries are all but impossible without meticulous data analysis. To this respect we are very interested in using and testing the services and technologies Yandex is developing. CERN collaboration with Yandex started few years ago and we are now very pleased to strengthen it with Yandex becoming a CERN openlab Associate,” says Bob Jones, head of CERN openlab.

“We have built a friendly relationship with the European Organization for Nuclear Research, and, by joining CERN now we reinforce and expand our collaboration. Being a CERN openlab Associate opens up new opportunities for contributing to the Organization’s projects and gives us a wide access to the LHC experiment data. These datasets allow us both to improve our technologies and contribute to advances in physics,” says Andrey Ustyuzhanin, head of the CERN openlab Associate Sponsorship at Yandex.

“Yandex has been collaborating with CERN since 2011, when the company made available computing resources for the LHCb experiment’s data analysis, on a scale similar to those provided by a number of leading European research institutions,” says Marco Cattaneo, LHCb Computing Project Leader. Last spring, Yandex also launched a custom-built search tool for processing the data obtained at the LHCb experiment. Yandex is the first Russian company collaborating with CERN openlab.

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